Weebly or Wobbly

Posted on December 6, 2011 by chris


How can website hosting be free ? Let’s take a gander at “Weebly” which claims to be “free” website hosting.

One preliminary point i’d like to make is that anyone can offer free web-hosting. Even I can do that. Just sign up w/ some non-FREE web-hosting company that allows unlimited domains / websites on a single account. Now you’re eligible to offer free web-hosting to anyone you know, or anyone you don’t know.


For Weebly hosting to be truly free, the address of your site will be: bozo.weebly.com, assuming your name is “bozo” or your business is “clowning”. If you want the address to be: www.bozo.com, ie. without the “weebly”, then Weebly will charge you for that, and they’ll charge you way more than if you bought the name bozo.com elsewhere. For a dot com (.com) name, i wouldn’t pay more than $10. To really grasp why you wouldn’t want “weebly” in your website name, imagine a site like: sir_winston_churchill.weebly.com or newyorkstockexchange.weebly.com. Even in the case of “bozo”, bozo.com will be taken more seriously than bozo.weebly.com.

Next, Weebly will put a link in the footer (the bottom) of your pages that says “Create a free website with Weebly.” If you try to get rid of that link, a window will pop open inviting you to “Upgrade to Weebly Pro”. The pre-selections in the Window will have you signing up for 2 years of un-FREE web-hosting, if you proceed. Oh, and every time you publish a page, Weebly encourages you to buy “bozo.com” if you don’t own “bozo” yet, and thus are using the name: bozo.weebly.com.

Let’s assume that you bought the domain name: “bozo.com” elsewhere (not at Weebly) for $10 and therefore have exhausted your funds, so you’d like to use Weebly’s free web-hosting. Whereever you bought your name, or, whereever you registered your name, you have to login to that place (the registrar’s website) and tell the registrar where your website actually is. You tell your registrar that the website, corresponding to the domain name that you purchased (ie. bozo.com) is hanging out over at Weebly. You’ll need to find out Weebly’s computer address and add that to everything your registrar knows about your domain name. Say someone opens up their browser and types in: www.bozo.com: your browser then has to find your main webpage (your home page) which is hiding over at Weebly. The browser consults your registrar which tells it to head on over to Weebly. Only then can your browser snarf your webpage from Weebly and dump it onto someone’s computer screen.

Now for using Weebly to build a site: the first hardship i encountered was that Weebly wouldn’t allow me to upload images for some reason. And i couldn’t upload a file period. What i could do was type some text into an editor on my computer and then paste it into Weebly. To do that i had to drag a text widget from the Weebly top widget bar into the body of my page, and then paste the text into the widget. The programming behind this mouse-based way of creating a webpage was a bit fragile. It felt like the program was always on the edge of getting upset. Weebly lets you spice up your text w/ some basic word processing stuff: bold the thing; put the thing on a slant; give it a color etc.

Weebly lets you choose a theme. The theme determines the basic look of your site. With a Weebly theme, you get a big picture for your page header (the top of the page,) and a place to put your menu. That’s about all the flexibility you have. That may be enough for some. There are other widgets you can add like slideshows and videos. Some of the widgets only come with Weebly Pro (the paid version of Weebly) so don’t click on those or you’ll get an Ad in your face.

Leaving Weebly is relatively clean. You can export/download your site’s files to your computer. And the textual content is relatively free of formatting goop, so migrating your content to a different website framework will not hurt too much. This is the very best feature of Weebly.

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The Problem of the LEFT-SHIFT key

Posted on November 11, 2011 by chris


WT (what the) Bleep is with the LEFT SHIFT key on almost all laptops these days, well at least the ones at Future Shop and Staples, where it is impossible to find a laptop w/ a reasonable LEFT SHIFT like you see here.

I was in Future Shop the other day on one of my downtown errand runs browsing for a 15 inch PC laptop for our co-op. Finding the 1st laptop that met performance and size prerequisites, i launched the little Windows ‘Crappy’, sorry ‘Sticky Notes’ app to test the keyboard. I typed the customary drill: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party” and then i tested the SHIFT keys by uppercasing the 1st letter of each word.


It was then that i noticed the “problem w/ the LEFT SHIFT key.” The thing was now half its preordained size and it was sharing its space w/ a backslash key. Notorious history aside, the backslash ought not to be stealing the LEFT SHIFT key’s turf. The LEFT SHIFT was too far away from where my left pinkie natively resided (on the letter A key) and so my pinkie ended up hitting the key that sat just to the right of the LEFT SHIFT: and thus the reason for the regular appearance of the backslash in my Sticky Notes window. I tried to compensate by exaggerating the shifting of my left hand to reach the LEFT SHIFT key. Sometimes i overshot the keyboard itself, but even when i found the LEFT SHIFT, my left hand required a compass to claw its way back to its standard position, and so a cascade of further errors ensued.


I repeated this on several laptops and filled Sticky Notes windows full of backslash-ridden nonsense. On the way out i stopped and typed into a Macbook (Future Shop actually sells Macs) and for the 1st time did not encounter the LEFT SHIFT brokenness i had recently grown accustomed to. It was wonderful to simply capitalize the letter ‘i’ without the subtle stress of a possible backslash.


Hoping for better fortune, i ran several blocks east to Staples. This time though i was smarter and headed 1st to fetch a ruler a few aisles over from the laptop aisle. I began measuring the horizontal distance between the left border of the letter A key and the right border of the LEFT SHIFT key. In my peripheral there were several others debating processor types, speeds and harddrive sizes. And there i was carefully measuring w/ my Staples ruler. It did not go unnoticed (to me) that my behaviour, coupled w/ my outfit, which was my errand-run winterized version, highly suggested “street person”. It consisted of 7 layers of shirts and sweaters, 3 leg layers, 2 scarves, a hobo’s toque and headband combo, and this clincher: 2 extra shirts: long sleeves roped around my waist; the shirt trunks hanging like a skirt. The purpose of this running “add-on” was to aggressively counter the inevitable wet cold, which innocently began as warm sweat.

Anyhow, the smallest “LEFT-SHIFT GAP” was close to 11mm and some were as big as 12mm. The 11mm ones were better (there were some Toshibas and an Asus that came in close to this) than the 12s, which were impossible, but still clearly inferior by “normal” keyboarding standards.


Several days later it occurred to me that Dell laptops might not have evolved their laptop keyboards into bozoboards. I looked closely at online images of the Dell Inspiron 15R, and i was pleased to see quite a large LEFT SHIFT key (not the now-pervasive tiny one w/ its next-door backslash neighbour.) I promptly submitted an order online for a Dell Inspiron 15R.


However, the very next day, i ran across this frightening image below of an Inspiron 15R. I believe the apparent contradiction can be reconciled by 2 possibilities: 1st that the Inspiron 15R has more than 1 model / model#, and 2nd, that there may be country-specific keyboard differences. Dell has assured me, after introducing me to every one of their 1000 departments, that the particular model headed my way is the one w/ the very nice LEFT SHIFT.

The Dell has just arrived (Nov 30 2011) and it’s got the big LEFT SHIFT.

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How to Shop for a Top

Posted on November 1, 2011 by chris

Unless you’re hardly going to use the thing, you don’t want to get a small laptop. Anything under 13 inches and you’re going to hurt yourself. Eyes do not like looking at little things for very long, except for maybe diamonds. Sure you can increase the font size of stuff on the screen, but then you’ll end up scrolling yourself silly. Plus your fingers will suffer: small laptops have to squeeze keyboards into a tiny space.

On the other hand, if you’re going to be walking or biking the top, or even nuzzling it on your lap, you don’t want to be getting a big laptop. Anything bigger than 13 inches and you’re going to crush yourself. But you also need to get the weight down too: for a laptop togo, you want something as close to 3 pounds as possible.

For laptops on-the-go, you can further reduce the weight by just taking out the battery. Leave the battery at home, if there are plugins where you’re headed. The power adapter may be lighter than the battery. If you need the battery, but don’t need the extended life of a 9 or 6 cell battery, swap in a lighter 3 cell. Get a laptop with no optical drive to save more weight. If you need such a thing, just get an external one, and leave it at home. If you don’t need massive harddrive storage, reduce the weight further, by getting a laptop w/ a lighter solid-state harddrive.

For stay-at-home tops that don’t even move in the house, skip the laptop, and get a desktop w/ a big screen, or get one of those all-in-1s that look like they’re just screens, and have somehow hidden a tower inside themselves. If the top is going to move around in your house, and only travel by car, then you may as well get something w/ a big screen that moves, ie. a big laptop.

You are going to be looking at your laptop. There is no way around that. Eyes do not like looking at the sun. Glossy screens will deliver the sun into your eyes, especially if you like to work outside. Try a matte screen or a matte coat for your laptop if you’re glare-bound.

You have to type with your top. Make sure you can type all the keys easily. Especially test the shift keys and the return key and whatever other key you’re likely to hit with some regularity.

If you’re not a mouser, and like the trackpad, really test it. Left-click, right-click, paste etc. Is it so big that your wrists and arms are actually moving the cursor ? Is it so inappropriately sensitive that you keep triggering click events w/ your sleeves ? Can the blasted thing be disabled completely ?

The carpenter with big pockets doesn’t have to go back to the van. Even if you never use your laptop, make sure it has decent-sized pockets or 4GB of RAM. And make sure it has a 64 bit processor, otherwise it can’t even use all its pockets. The low-end of any current processor family (i3 for eg.) will due for emailers, surfers and typers.

If you want to avoid waiting for your laptop to wrestle itself away from whavever it is doing, and respond to your latest click, or if you’d like your laptop to really move at a nice clip, then 1st: get more pockets, say 6 or 8 GB. Next, choose a medium-level (i5 for eg.) of any current processor family. A dedicated graphics card is your next improvement: without one, your laptop has to handle graphics by itself. This is like sending someone out to the forest to cut down trees w/ a steak knife. USB 3.0 is like sticking a big firehose on the side of your laptop: stuff can go in and out of the laptop much quicker. Make sure you’re not stuck w/ USB 2.0. Finally, get a solid-state harddrive, which is just another electricity-based chip. Regular harddrives have mechanical parts. It’s not a bad idea to picture a windmill and an electric fan when comparing regular harddrives and their solid-state cousins. Solid-state harddrives mean your apps (and the computer itself !) will start faster.

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How Big is my RAM’s Harddrive ?

Posted on October 16, 2011 by chris

My friend G and I were sipping this marvelous coffee (from Harrods London U.K.) in his fantastic library the other day, leisurely discussing how relating to computers was an art, when I shyly ventured a direct question: “G, what is the difference between RAM and a HARDDRIVE? Are they basically the same thing?” Without saying anything, G walked right out of the library and for the next few minutes began pacing the main hall of his house. Upon re-entering the library, G immediately launched into a most unusual commentary. What follows are the notes I assembled afterwards.

Think of all the stuff you own and where you keep it Sweetbits (G calls me “Sweetbits” because of how keenly I listen to compu-anything – he says that I don’t just listen with my head but it is as if my belly had ears.) Basically, you keep it in your house. Some of your stuff should not be in your house – it’s only there because it fits, perhaps because you have a basement or a garage. Like that giant stuffed camel at the far end of your basement. You’ve only seen it once in your life, but thank-goodness you had room for it.

camel
A HARDDRIVE is like your house. A big HARDDRIVE is like having a house with a basement. They are great because you can store all of your photos of your camel. Plus all the songs you sang the day the camel arrived: they can fit on your big HARDDRIVE.

shirtpockets
When you leave your house, you fill your pockets with some of your stuff. But not just any old stuff, not your camel, only what you’re going to use on your outing. You might put your keys, your wallet, your breath mints, your hanky in your pocket. The stuff that you use, you want close to you. Like your watch for instance: you’ll even keep it on your wrist, so your eyes can find it quickly.

RAM (which means: Right Away Ma’am) is like your computer’s pockets. When you command your computer to run your Firefox browser, it immediately stuffs Firefox (which had been luxuriating on the HARDDRIVE) into its RAM (its pockets.)

Imagine if, when you departed from your house, you left your watch behind and every time you wanted to check the time you had to go running back home!

Well, if your computer’s pockets are full (ie. it’s already running plenty of programs), and you command it to run a program that is not sitting in its pockets (RAM), it in effect has to empty some pockets; run back to its house (HARDDRIVE;) fetch that program you asked for; stuff it in its pockets and proceed. When you then switch to a program that isn’t in its pockets anymore, the nightmare continues.

So that is why it is important to wear overalls … no, sorry, what I mean is: that is why it is important to have lots of RAM. These days you want at least 2GBs (GB means: Great Big).

Now, at the end of the day, you empty your pockets. But you don’t empty your house. You might empty your trash that’s in your house, but furniture does not regularly get tossed out on the lawn at the end of the day. The same applies to computers: when you turn them off, the RAM is dumped. The HARDDRIVE is not.

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Once Upon a Bit

Posted on September 16, 2011 by chris

cake
Many years ago before I had developed such a fancy for computers, I was over at my friend G’s house celebrating his birthday. The sight of G’s decadently frosted birthday cake loosened a story which I then recalled to G about a grandmother who was so old that her family couldn’t fit all the candles on her birthday cake. G looked at me with a most remarkable sparkle in his eyes, and, I shall never forget it, said: “they should have used bits.” On perceiving on my countenance, what G often called “the poster face for the city of Perplexia,” he continued: “Sweetbits …”

< G calls me Sweetbits because of the I-just-ate-an-entire-box-of-licorice grin that fills my face when he speaks about computers. >
“It’s high time you learned something about bits, but that being such a topic of great depth, we will be content today to lay these three foundation bricks.”

  1. Symbols
  2. Number Symbols
  3. One Symbol or Two

cow
Picture a cow. That picture is a symbol for a cow. The word cow is a symbol for a cow. Well actually, cow is three separate symbols: c, o, and w jammed together in a line.
Symbols are really handy. They can save you from always being near the thing you’re referring to. Let’s say you’re sitting around the farmhouse w/ your wife Mildred, chatting it up about all the shananigans the cows have been up to: “Mildred honey, confound it if I didn’t find another cow in the chicken pen today! Cows don’t have feathers Mildred! Why in God’s name does that cow think she’s a chicken!”

Now the thing is: if you didn’t have those 3 letter symbols: c, o, and w, which allowed you to make that word symbol: cow, you would have had to haul Mildred out to the chicken pen in the middle of your cow vignette just so she’d know exactly what kind of thing had raised your spirits so much.

Next, suppose some guy Frederick in the next town wants to buy your cows and he’s been hounding you about how many cows you have. Well heck if you know that! Nobody in your family ever learned how to count! All you’ve been able to muster up for Frederick is: “Shucks, I’ve got a lot of cows.” or: “Dag nammit, Frederick, we’ve got ourselves a cattle farm over here.” When Frederick begins to get frustrated you realize you had better do something.

So the next day you head out to the yard packing a nice lunch that Mildred fixed for you, with the idea that you’ll just walk those cows over to Frederick’s, so that he might take a gander at them and get a good picture of how many you have. You’ve got the cows out of the main yard and are about to set out when you spot a pile of little sticks near the fence. A bright light flashes inside your noggin as you realize you can use the sticks to count your cows. So one-by-one you march the cows back through the gate and as each cow passes, you toss a stick into your backpack. You’re pretty “stuffed” with your brilliant discovery so you even show off a bit, lying down and indifferently reaching for sticks as the cows pass, all the while chewing on a thistle. But then disaster strikes: your backpack fills up, and that’s with most of the herd still to come.

oneseventeen
But this is where we come back to the grandmother’s birthday cake. With the cake, you’ve run out of candle room. With the backpack, you’ve run out of stick room. In both predicaments you’ve only got one type of symbol to work with. Let’s hone in on the cake and say that the grandmother is 117 years old, which means the cake wants to be infested with 117 lit candles. Here’s what to do: 1st remove all the candles you’ve managed to fit on the cake. Pick seven of them and poke them back into the cake so that they make a straight line. Now light the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 7th candles. Bingo! Candle problem solved. Plus the icing on the cake is that the grandmother only has to blow out 5 candles. That way she’ll be able to attend her birthday party the next year.

Now what sort of sorcery is this? Ok, 1st I need to tell you about mappings. When you map the world, what do you do? You throw out all sorts of details, and then whatever’s left you shrink, and then draw it on a piece of paper (called a “map”.) That’s how the actual country of Italy turns into a flat shrunken boot. Now our farmer mapped cows to sticks because all he cared about was counting his cows, so it was ok that pretty well everything that a cow is was lost in the mapping. And typical birthday cakes (the ones with only flame-bearing candles) map somebody’s age to lit candles.

So here’s my magical mapping that makes it possible to use candles to declare a grandmother’s age on a birthday cake, without running out of room. It maps sequences of lit candles (ie. what appears on conventional birthday cakes) to sequences of “Binary” candles (ie. candles that can be in one of two states: either lit or unlit.)
map

Ok, let’s say that instead of a 117 year old grandmother we’ve got a 3 year old rascal. You can see from the mapping that even with such a young rascal, you’re already beginning to save on candles, in that you only need 2 candles. And you’re beginning to really eco-candle by the time the rascal hits seven years. Just 3 candles are needed!

Now winding things up, since you’re looking sleepy, Sweetbits. The punchline is that these Binary candles, that is candles that can be in one of two states, are bits! And what’s more, it’s not just people’s ages that can be mapped to bits, but also our favorite farmer’s cow-sticks. And it gets even more wonderful. But all that can wait until after your nap.

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